so, instead of giving me info about the position in email, the recruiter type decided to "find someone else to fill the position". if all recruiters are this attached to the phone, i can spend days tormenting them. and i thought recruiters were just there to torment me. 09:31 pm

alpha testing deepleap is having a serious impact on the quantity of work i'm doing. i don't think my boss would be too happy. but, it's too much fun finding bugs that other people have to fix. :-) 05:59 pm

i just discovered one of the *really* cool features of deepleap (leap tools). (as opposed to the just sort of cool features.) of course, i can't tell what it is because they'd kill me, but it's cool. 05:43 pm

deepleap is now in alpha. i've only just started playing with it. 05:33 pm

i just sent in my entry for the 5k award. i like it so much, i may use it for a redesign. then it won't be 5k anymore. 03:39 pm

i don't understand why recruiter types expect you to jump through hoops for them. i despise the telephone, so prefer to communicate by email. so, someone needs to give me enough details about an opportunity for me to say "hey, i'm interested enough to overcome my aversion and use the phone". but, a lot of recruiters are much more comfortable with the phone, maybe they figure that if they can just *talk* to you they'll be able to convince you. dunno. so they try to insist on you calling them before they'll reveal this *wonderful* opportunity. i've had this happen 4 or 5 times now, and i don't know how to explain to them that *they* need to jump through hoops for *me*, not the other way around. 01:00 pm

some more musing about living online. i was in the salon on saturday waiting for my sister to get done with a client (so she could dye my hair purple), and sat talking to my step-mom, who was also waiting for my sister to get done with the paying client. anyway, she mentioned that it was surprising that it hadn't rained that much today, i responded with "oh, is there supposed be a storm coming in?". when she said yes, it hit me that other people tune in to the weather and get a forecast of what the weather will be like for the next couple days. i just walk out my door and see what it's like. the weather doesn't matter online. 10:14 pm

hee hee. i love the folks at pyra. i just noticed that they'd but the pronunciation of "blogger" on the front page. now jason will have to say it right, and i won't go insane. thank you. 10:09 pm

this "special report" sounded like it would be an interesting article on the real world vs. virtuality, instead it's just a really long rant. 07:30 pm

i don't know if hotwired's japan version is released later than the us version, but i got over 500 hits from hotwired.co.jp today. 07:17 pm

so, my dad told my sister how wonderful my blog was and made her read it too. they both told me, separately, that they've learned more about me than they ever knew before. odd, and kind of scary. the 3 or 400 people who read my blog daily know me better than my family. i hope it doesn't make me feel like i need to censor myself.

today, jason, who *never* reads my blog, im's me and says that i should have ordered him some headphones too. then i start thinking, oh no, what if he starts reading it too, and tells me that he knows me so much better now. but, he just says that my blog only confirms stuff that he already knew about me. which is probably why he doesn't bother to read it. sometimes it can be reassuring that at least one person knows you really well. 07:14 pm

jwz built the industrial bookcase and the industrial cd case from aluminum pipe. a couple of years ago, jason and i built some bookshelves and tables from copper pipe and had an even more difficult time. we had to cut the pipe by hand and then weld the joints. it sucked. i'm pretty sure it wasn't worth the effort. 06:46 pm

if you have wrist pain from typing, you should read how jwz dealt with it. 06:35 pm

i started reading the 5 novels by daniel pinkwater this weekend. i got through the first. it was just completely bizarre, yet immensely enjoyable. it's just impossible to imagine where his train of thought will go next. 01:23 pm

ev pointed to these noise cancelling headphones, but i hate headbands. so, i ordered this model which feature the Fontopia in-the-ear design. i've been needing some good headphones for a while now. 01:10 pm

i probably won't be learning to scuba dive. it seems that they don't like people w/ epilepsy taking it up as a sport. there's still a very slim chance my doctor will ok it, because i only have seizures when i'm asleep, presumably i'm not going to fall asleep while scuba diving. sometimes i wonder what it would be like to live life without constantly taking medication to control a permanent condition. sometimes i wonder what it'll be like to live the rest of my life constantly on medication... 01:06 pm

heehee. dori got the psychic spam. i wonder how much money this lady has actually made from this scheme. 09:35 am

we also went to games last night. (games being a bunch of pot smoking older men who get together to play board games, with a few younger geekier men thrown in.) i stopped going about a year ago, partly because i was the only woman there, but mostly because i realized it was taking up a huge amount of what little free time i had, and i'd really rather be reading a book or surfing the net. the only reason i went last night was because colin specifically asked us to go. i hadn't seen col in almost 3 years. he lives in england and the last couple of times he's been out, we've not been able to hook up. i realized how sad it was that a friend who i really love, although never talk to between visits, could be unseen for so long. then i thought about my other friends who only live 30 mins away, and how i never see them either. or one of my best friends from college who lives in sf and i haven't seen or talked to in almost 3 years either. hmmm. 12:26 pm

last night, i left work early to go talk to the scuba instructor. i asked him if equipment was included in the course price, and he went into a spiel on how *everything* was included because the shop had this attitude, blah blah blah. everything but personal equipment, of course. personal equipment being mask, snorkel, fins, booties, & gloves. which run anywhere from $120-$300/person. as he explained the different features of the personal equipment, i couldn't help thinking about all the other sports we've gotten into, purchasing lots of expensive equipment upfront, and then losing interest a few months later. i'm betting on this being another, but you never know. 12:16 pm

jason has insisted that we getting scuba certification before we go to australia. of course, getting that done in the 3 weeks before he leaves, when i'm going to be in austin one of those weeks, is a little insane. apparently, it's a sin to go to the great barrier reef and not dive. i don't quite understand that, but, yeah, whatever. 02:30 pm

i was wondering why i couldn't get to alistapart yesterday this email from glenn davis explains why. covad screwed up big time. 01:05 pm

heh. sally tenpenny returns to bloat. 01:00 pm

i think i want a quartz. via tomalak. 12:25 pm

i try not to add too many new categories to the portal despite how finely people want to classify themselves. but this one was just so bizarre i could only stare dumbfounded. tea cosy mission log is completely devoted to halcyon. of course, it *needed* it's own category. 10:44 pm

i've discovered that it's the little things that can drive us insane. jason insists on pronouncing blog as bee*log. which wasn't too annoying since we rarely talked about it. now that he's using blogger tho, i keep hearing him say bee*logger constantly. finally tonight i just yelled "blog*ger, goddammit, it's blog*ger". his response being that they should spell it phonetically if they want him to pronounce it that way. so this is a formal request to ev, pb & meg to put the pronounciation of blogger on the site, that way i won't go to jail for killing my husband in a fit of madness caused by him saying bee*logger one more time. 10:05 pm

an interesting report on using sitemaps on every page. the numbers are amazing. 02:07 pm

has anyone noticed how the web is the ultimate method of avoiding discrimination of all forms. you can talk to many people who, if you're lucky, you know their sex, you rarely know their age, you occasionally know their race, and you occasionally know their sexual preferences. so people are judged not by learned prejudices, but by who they are and how they interact with you. anita's entry inspired this. 01:38 pm

i love neale's sense of humor. 11:36 am

this is the most revolting piece of work i've ever seen. mostly because i invested so much time into getting it *right* and i just watched it all get destroyed by people who don't know the difference between a ui and a database, or a print graphic, attempting to modify it. what pisses me off the most is their complete violation of their privacy policy. the privacy policy has now changed, and everybody who opted-out of any sort of email is now signed up for "partner email". nice. and there's nothing in their policy *anymore* that says that they won't sell or rent your info. disgusting. i can't believe i've got stock in this company. 11:19 am

it's good to know that we're getting paid more for being always on. via tomalak. 08:06 pm

last night i was telling my sister how most of the hits to my dad's real estate site were from here. the sad thing being that i'd said how embarrassed i was. her instant reaction was "you better hope he doesn't read it". i promptly assured her that dad would never read my blog. i mean, he's known i had a web site for years, and he's never looked at it. why would he now?

of course, because i said that, he decided to look at it. but, the reaction i got was something i never expected. it got me all teary eyed.

"*Fucking* brilliant. Excuse the french, but i just spent some considerable amount of time in eatonweb. Some of your blog commentary is really quite insightful. But mainly, i want to say how impressed i am. There is also a whole world of generational communication that you've mastered and appear to be pioneering. I hope you continue to shape the future. luv....dad"

i had no idea brad was so cute. apparently, he's vowed revenge on wendell. 07:12 pm

i moved my "communicating w/ marketing people" rant where it belonged. it was a wee bit long for the blog. 07:10 pm

a really interesting Alan Cooper interview from uidesign.net. 04:19 pm

hee hee. wendell's done it again. 03:22 pm

tama is a cat to rival aibo. except for the one hour battery life. 02:25 pm

i never want to go through an airport experience like ben's. 01:05 pm

i've also had quite a few that i couldn't get through to. so if you're not listed, you may want to try submitting it again, and make sure the url is right. 12:08 pm

get listed in wired, and all the crazies come out of the woodwork. i've had obscure portals pretending to be blogs, free email services pretending to be blogs. my concept of blog is amazingly loose, but these are just stretching it a bit too far... 12:06 pm

my inbox this morning had about 25 requests for new blog listings. unusual since i rarely get more than one or two a day. couldn't figure it out until i saw the link to this wired story. what i really hate tho, is journalists who promise to let you know when an article will be published and then promptly forget. sigh. 10:47 am

webvan now lets you order books. so, for example, i could order dean koontz's book seize the night and pay $4.79 have it delivered tomorrow for $4.95, or i could order it from amazon and pay $6.39 and $3.99 to have it delivered in 3 to 7 days. $9.75 tomorrow, or $10.38 a week from now? i just wish they had better selection. 08:04 pm

i have never seen the advantage of html email. it's a tool of the evil marketing types. via john. 07:44 pm

heh. this is something i could never have possibly imagined. having my site linked from someone's resume. in fact, i thought i was the only one who listed weblogs as an interest on my resume. 07:28 pm

all those weblogs that don't have cool, cutting-edge design better watch out. jason snell of macworld says that "the web has moved beyond the do-it-yourselfer". when will people figure out that it's the content, not the design that keeps people coming back? 07:25 pm

someone should show the 10 Big Myths about copyright to the people over at passportaccess. via bump. 07:17 pm

yuck. kenneth cole redesigned. it's all flash, and as far as i can tell, the only way to shop is "by look". the old design wasn't perfect, but at least i could buy stuff. 05:33 pm

ok, the marry tom arnold thing is repulsive. but, i'm wondering, will his choice be based in part on how fast the woman's internet connection is? via metafilter. 05:01 pm

a disturbing account of h1-b visa abuses. via dan gillmor. 04:45 pm

more proof that blogging is infectious. i got jason to start one last month, and this month liz started one. all by herself. you will all be assimilated. 01:51 pm

peter dug up this article from last june interviewing Richard Saul Wurman. 12:57 pm

this morning i realized why i don't take the hwy 17 commuter bus (aside from the fact that the bus station is a long way from work). i watched a bus weaving through traffic like a sports car, going at least 70mph, and cutting off other drivers, all this while it was pouring so hard you could barely see the car in front of you, on a very curvy two lane road. if i'd been on that bus, i'd have been praying that i'd get to work in one piece. 12:43 pm

my paperwhites opened over the weekend. i am very surprised that they lived and that they bloomed. amazing. 01:48 pm

so i get up, get ready for work, commute to work, walk in the unusually locked door at work, and discover that no one else is here. apparently today is a holiday. the only good thing is that i can use the t-1 to surf instead of my 28.8k connection at home. that and i can leave any time i want. i think i need to go shopping... 12:14 pm

Goodwood's British Market will ship real easter eggs! and lots of other yummy english food. i am forever indebted to mike for finding this for me. 11:54 am

nick, has decided to torture me with descriptions of creme egg ice cream, which is only available in oxford. yum. 03:37 pm

jason has a long discourse on what design means from a designers point-of-view. 03:23 pm

i don't know how he does it, but derek has an amazing talent for getting people to talk. one little "you tell me" link has spawned pages & pages of opinions. 03:15 pm

it's february, and easter stuff is already on the shelves. is easter in march or april? anyway, last night while in the drugstore i saw someone carrying cadbury's creme eggs. there's two things easter means to me: creme eggs, and english easter eggs (an egg-shaped chocolate shell filled with some other candy, like buttons or smarties). i've never found english easter eggs in the u.s., but creme eggs have been imported for a while. so i decide that i must purchase said creme eggs and surprise there's a new kind of creme egg, chocolate creme eggs. thinking that they must be at least as good as regular creme eggs, i buy some of them too. unfortunately, they were a huge disappointment. very much like a chocolate filled with ganache, but not as good. oh well, at least i've got regular ones too. 02:46 pm

god. the portal page size is getting obscenely large. it's up to 92k. i don't know what i'm going to do with it. 02:36 pm

well, katiesoft, the last of the metabrowsers that i tried, turned out to be a disappointment too. although, it may just not be suited for laptops, i found it very constraining. it was like having 4 browser windows open but shrunk down very small so they all fit side-by-side. i find swapping window focus convenient enough that this tool is useless to me. besides, i'd rather have larger, more visible windows and swap, than have tiny ones that barely show the page. oh well, they were all nice ideas anyway. just not useful. 02:28 pm

i like the colors on this blog. Stuff & Rot has an amusing rant about web design celebrities. what's even funnier is the requirements for being a trendy web designer:

"#1 - they have a weblog, always powered by blogger, never a pita.
#2 - they post their DopeWars score on their weblog, along with the requisite links to kottke, wetlog, eatonweb, and the aforementioned evhead and megnut.
#3 - they're going to SXSW."

alamut discussed ontogroups a few days ago. these seem to be very similar in concept to neale's blog-circles. although paul thought of it first. sorry, neale. 01:24 pm

oops, sorry dave, i didn't look hard enough at weblogger.com. the person doing it is erin clerico. so erin is being really gutsy in trying to charge for hosting/blog creation tools. thanks for the correction mike. 12:48 pm

i see now why dave and i have such a difference of opinion on this. i think people do get hurt by what others say, it may be self-induced, but many people are sensitive to that. but saying that these are just ones and zeros is like saying that conversation is just sound waves. i wouldn't call a friend an a%@hole and then think that he shouldn't be hurt by that. but, that may just be me. 12:23 pm

i spent most of last night torturing sims. there's some sick pleasure in letting them starve to death, or finally getting them to get married and then allowing the newlywed wife to die in a fire. i think this game brings out the worst in us. later today, i'll have to move a new couple into the house of the woman who starved. i'm twisted, i know. 12:19 pm

wow, dave's taken the leap, trying to make a profit from a weblog creation/hosting tool. i'll be really interested to see if he suceeds, as i'm sure andrew and a few others will. it's certainly a gutsy move. 12:10 pm

CallTheShots, Inc. got scratched off my list quicker than quickbrowse. they're doing a closed beta. i have no problem with closed betas, just don't act like someone can join it from your homepage. in fact, don't advertise it at all. 11:58 am

well, i quickly discovered that quickbrowse is pretty useless. the feature they're trying to sell, which sounded pretty cool, is the concatenation of several webpages in one browser window, enabling quicker browsing. i attempted to do this to a couple of blogs, and this is the result. annoyingly, you can't bookmark the initial page, you have to let them create a unique url for it. the biggest problem is that they can't deal with stylesheets. which makes megnut and evhead completely unreadable. also, the download time is as long, if not longer, than the actual pages. opening 3 browser windows would be much more useful. 11:47 am

hmm. metabrowsing, i need to play with some of these. via john. 11:32 am

Net firms lose workers to newer start-ups. makes sense. 06:23 pm

new rant on online relationships. 06:11 pm

the foopster laughs at it all once again. 05:33 pm

why derek doesn't hate weblogs, and what others think a weblog is. 05:12 pm

wow. i can't wait for the novel. glassdog.LANCE (life serial). the redesign is nice too. via derek. 03:10 pm

speaking of books, jill recommended elizabeth george as a good mystery writer similar to p.d. james. 02:08 pm

i did follow lane's recommendation to read daniel pinkwater tho. i just bought 5 novels. 01:21 pm

a few days ago bryan ranted about buffy the vampire slayer. since i too find it incomprehensible that is so much hype around it, i related very much to his rant. but, lane told him to keep it to himself. so i have to come out in support of buffy haters everywhere. besides, whenever someone tells me to be quiet, i always feel compelled to make noise. personality problem. 01:18 pm

so after thinking about the whole separation of html and jsp thing last night. and reading some insightful emails this morning, i've come to the conclusion that separation is probably a good thing. not for the incomprehensible purity/elegance thing, but because implementing it now will cause fewer headaches later when we hire a huge team of people who are completely specialized (either in jsp or html). then they can work on their separate files with out clashing. the other big reason is then i don't have to worry about engineers messing with my ui. 01:08 pm

A Picture of Weblogs has been improved. you can now search for a blog, and see the links going into and out from it. cool.

yes, i was reminded of this by skimming scripting news, looking for particularly nasty comments about design quality. considering half the web designers out there practically worship derek for his design skills, i don't see how anyone could take dave's comments at all seriously. i mean, scripting news has been on my list of worst designed sites since i first saw it. 12:51 pm

jen has a portal which lists good stuff like zingermans where i've been drooling over bread and brownies for the last 30 min. 06:54 pm

meg redesigned again. i definitely like the color scheme much better. i am getting tired of all the pages designed for 800px wide tho. 06:11 pm

speaking of self-taught, we seem to be repeating the same conversation over and over around here. one of the programmers will talk about a tool to separate the html from the jsp, all the other programmers will say "wow, that's cool" and i will say "why bother?". then we get into this discussion of it being better to separate the two. with me not being able to grasp the value of it.

i was starting to get the feeling that by wanting to code the jsp pages, i was either stepping into the other engineer's area, or there was an attempt to keep me away from the jsp code. either way, it wasn't looking like a pretty picture.

so i went and talked to my boss, who explained it. apparently sun released these blueprints for separating the business logic, from the server-side presentation, from the client-side presentation. this supposedly has a lot of attraction to the programmers, which is why they keep trying to implement it.

i think i've been coding html pages for too long. i mean, i can sort of see the attraction of separating it all, but i'd really rather code one page and lump it all together. why bother editing several different files when you can just put it all in one? either that, or i haven't yet been assimilated into the object-oriented programming mindset. i wonder if this would be considered an asset or a deficit. 06:06 pm

apparently, yesterday tom was not allowed to express his opinion because he was "not a designer". formal design backgrounds are great for pure graphic designers, but become hugely unimportant in the web world. good thing most companies look at work experience and portfolio, or this self-taught designer wouldn't be making a 6-digit salary. 05:56 pm

i decided to register brig.nu anyway. i don't know what i'm going to do with it yet, but i'll think of something. 12:13 pm

this game description describes really well what i was saying. how the game is monotonous, but bizarrely fascinating. from reading this, i don't think i'm torturing my sims enough. 12:05 pm

interview with will wright, creator of simcity and his latest, the sims. i got this game last week and spent 8 or 10 hours on saturday playing it. i liked it, but couldn't seem to manipulate my sims as much as i wanted to. (maybe i should read the manual.) the one trouble i have with all of the sim games is that you spend a huge amount of real time, waiting for a small amount of sim time to go by. you come out of it feeling like you've wasted a whole day. 11:55 am

Drive Different. via lindsay. 11:42 am

what's really sad, tho, is my biggest concern being lack of internet access. going for a week without it is going to send me into serious withdrawal. besides i was considering doing a travel log. 11:31 am

last night, we decided to go to heron island, on our australia trip. mostly because it's directly on the great barrier reef. which means you can "walk straight from the beach to the Reef's edge". of course, we haven't booked any of this, so plans may change. 11:28 am

in the ongoing saga of my valentine's day gift, part of it arrived this morning. it was paperwhite bulbs that were presprouted and all squished together under bubblewrap. i'm not holding high expectations that these will survive and actually bloom. we'll see. 06:42 pm

doh. i just spent the whole day wondering why jason wasn't on im. it finally occurred to me that he took the day off, so he would never be getting on. sad, i know. i never really got into im before, but over the last couple of weeks, i've been finding it really useful. email has become too slow. which is disturbing in some inexplicable way. 06:40 pm

oh. i take it back. they're just testing at least 3 more new designs. 04:08 pm

ugh. it looks like amazon decided to go with their portal frontdoor design. 03:59 pm

i can't seem to motivate myself to work. maybe because the hard part of the ui is done and i just don't feel like doing the easy bits. 03:58 pm

i want this chair. i can't come to terms with spending $1300 for a chair tho. 03:15 pm

Willing To Try via neale. 02:39 pm

it seems ben had an exciting nite out. 02:26 pm

ummm. i care about my pets and all, but i wouldn't pay $200k to clone them. now, my husband, maybe. 02:14 pm

this study claims that heavy net users are socially isolated. mostly because they watch a lot less tv. goes to show, you can make any survey give the results you're looking for. 02:10 pm

in the next 3 months, i'm going to be traveling more than i have in the last 3 years. in march, i'm going to sxsw. april 1, i'm going to australia for a week, which i plan to spend lounging on the great barrier reef. april 26, i'm going to vegas for 5 days. and the last week in may, i'm going to new york. 12:15 pm

i discovered what happened to my valentine's gift. fedex tried to deliver it last thursday, but didn't have the suite # for peoplescape. they then left me a message on my voicemail. unfortunately, i was never given a password for my voicemail, so i couldn't get rid of the annoying blinking light on my phone. well today i finally did something about it, heard the message and gave fedex the correct address. but, i wonder, will the plants be dead when they get here? i mean, they've been sitting in a box for the last week, right? 07:57 pm

odd. for some reason my isp reverted to my old mail settings and started forwarding my email back to pacbell. at least pacbell is sort of working. i hope they don't do it again tho. 07:44 pm

lawrence pointed out that compaq is using microsoft iis according to the netcraft lookup. the quote i gave was from one of their readers. 07:33 pm

i guess neale doesn't want to take over for bloat. but, i may take him up on his offer to write nasty things about me in private. 04:57 pm

i wouldn't be surprised if sun sued microsoft over these claims (found via cam). what i'm wondering, is how they took the netcraft survey which gives apache a 55% market share, and deduced that sun is only running 19% of those. they also claim that compaq runs it's site on windows, but the netcraft study clearly states that "compaq.com currently runs solaris and apache in preference to nt, linux, freebsd, digital unix, guardian or any other os". i shouldn't be surprised tho. 04:44 pm

this article cutting the cheese by joe clark came up on the webdesign-l mailing list. but, it wasn't until bump mentioned it that i thought to put my comments here. so now you have to suffer another long-winded entry. (can you tell i'm not working exceptionally hard today?) anyway the premise behind the article is that e-commerce sites should hire people like joe to write features done by professional writers to make themselves stand out from all the rest. beyond.com did this, they wasted huge amounts of money paying freelance writers to write "features" which got read by people who promptly went to buy.com to make their purchase. it worked so well that beyond has folded the consumer side of their business. features won't get people to shop at your site, low prices and great customer service will. (not that buy.com has great customer service, but it does have low prices.) 03:50 pm

looking in the mirror just now, i realized that my hair is definitely two distinct shades of blue. some sections (the stripes which i did initially) are definitely on the violet end of the spectrum. the rest of it (everything i did a few weeks ago) is more on the green end, kind of a teale but not that green. so, now i'm wondering if my sister used the same shade of blue both times, or if the rest of my hair wasn't bleached up enough to take the color properly. which reminds me i have to make an appointment to get it redone. 03:27 pm

so, i've been thinking a lot lately about getting on the domain name bandwagon. i was sick of looking at the really long url for my blog and i kinda thought brig.com would be cool. of course that and every other version were already taken. today, i took a look at jack's new site, and thought hey what about brig.nu. so i'm all set to run off and order it, but decide to run it by jason first. and he tells me to put my weblog in root because he doesn't care and besides .nu is stupid it sounds too much like pu. so all of that rambling was to state that you only need to go to http://www.eatonweb.com/ from now on. phew. talk about long-winded. 03:09 pm

scary. this guy is offer $25000 to the person who gets him a wife before the end of the year. 01:11 pm

not that this is useful to anyone unless they live in the santa cruz area, but i'm sure i'll need it again sometime. santa cruz road conditions. the main road from my house was flooded this morning, all but half a lane. then the usual road i take down off the hill was closed. so i had to go through santa cruz which added 30 min to my commute, which meant i didn't get coffee until 2 hours after i got up, which meant that i was in a nasty mood this morning. i hope it stops raining for a while. 07:36 pm

scarily true. When success isn't enough to satisfy. thanks john. 07:19 pm

been there, done that. i decided to leave, yeah that's it, i had a choice, really. via neale. 07:01 pm

ah. the recent nicety of bloat has been explained. since t. radhius took over, it's supposed to be "a weekly summary of the best logs". oh well. he's doing a good job at that, but i will still miss the elicit thrill of seeing how people's egos have been cut down to size each week. maybe neale will take over? 06:55 pm

wow. jack redesigned. i like the new layout, but i really miss the orange. sigh. 06:38 pm

my ex-co-worker from clip2, kim, is my co-worker once again. finally. i've missed him. and now that he's here, i feel like i can actually say where i'm working. i was trying to make his transition easier, since they were doing everything they could to get him to stay. so, i'm working at peoplescape, which on the surface looks like a really boring recruiting company, although it's hard to figure out what they are at all by looking at the website. luckily, i'm working on a new super-duper ultra-top-secret project, which is actually really interesting and kinda cool. 06:25 pm

not that i mind being called "one of the best and most blogular around", but bloat seems to be excessively nice lately. the only mildly nasty entry was about robot wisdom, and it was hardly nasty at all. but, everyone knows that since jorn went on sabbatical it's been pretty boring around there. interesting even with sally tenpenny back listing the top 8 new blogs, there's not much ascerbic wit to be found. 06:07 pm

for some odd reason, jason decided to buy me a valentine's day present. he hasn't bought me one since those first heady months of our relationship 7 years ago. (maybe not heady, but definitely first months.) the amusing thing, tho, is that i haven't gotten it. 1-800-flowers was supposed to deliver it on the 10th (no i don't know why the 10th) but it hasn't shown up. 06:01 pm

i can't believe charles schulz died last night. the day before his farewell peanuts strip. via array. 07:31 pm

over the last week, i finished 2 more graham joyce books: indigo and requiem. requiem wasn't bad, it just had way too much religion for my taste. although, it did make me ponder how much we really know about the whole jesus thing. after all, history is written by the winners, and they tend to write it however they want. indigo i thoroughly enjoyed, it's a hard book to describe, but i guess you just have to experience it, kind of like the color. 07:16 pm

since when did discussing stats become a taboo? well, if it is a taboo, tom has performed the ultimate sin in breaking it. via ev. 07:02 pm

hmmm. i don't think i ever mentioned this, but i created a large fonts version for susan. maybe others might appreciate it. 06:47 pm

lane has is unabashedly begging for votes in the people's choice awards. of course, we were all going to vote for him anyway he didn't need to beg, and i won't comment on the easy way to place multiple votes 01:03 pm

are your pages upside down? gives a pretty good argument for placing banner ads at the *bottom* of the page. via webword. 12:01 pm

i can't figure out exactly what Electrifier is planning on doing, but i am curious. "entirely new way to browse and buy online, bringing the pure energy and excitement of music video to Internet shopping". somehow, i've never associated excitement with videos or shopping. 11:32 am

who would have thought recruiters would become so important? 11:28 am

what i found most interesting about this article: Common Sense Rules for Interaction Design was the fact that he put a lot of responsibility of making sure the interface is usable onto qa's shoulders. i don't think i've seen any article that explicitly states this. although i have seen excellent qa people who know to do it. via webword. 11:07 am

bryan is leaving hidden clues about when they're going to tell us what deepleap really is. "Deepleap will not be profitable before the end of 2000." that at least implies that they'll launch *this* year, right? 07:49 pm

today has been another long day of meetings. actually it's been a long week of meetings. the only good thing, is that we've walked away from this week with a very solid functional spec. solid enough to actually start coming up with realistic deadlines on monday. which makes the torture somewhat worthwhile. and as long as i don't have to do it again for 6 months, i guess i'm ok with it. 07:45 pm

hey, i made $8,973,591 on dope wars today! it's really sad when you sit at work late on a friday night and play games instead of going home. sigh. 07:20 pm

oh no! ev's going to miss the first blogger get together. 06:48 pm

snicker. i want an action item secret decoder ring. via metafilter. 06:28 pm

watch out, i will soon be armed and dangerous with liquid key-scratch (scroll down). i only wish i was truly evil enough to do this without feeling guilty. thanks mike, i needed the pleasure of contemplating that. 12:42 pm

i'd like to hide this and pretend it doesn't exist, but i'm a masochist. my dad paid someone $700 to build this cookie-cutter site for his business. now i just have to pray that he has ftp access to his server so i can actually create a real site for him. i should never have told him i didn't have time to build him a site, i'm so embarrassed. 11:17 am

rant: i'd just like to point out to people who can't seem to understand this concept: suv's are *not* compact cars. every morning i squeeze into a spot labelled "compact" and squeeze out of my tiny little car because i have an suv on either side which is so wide it spreads into the space on either side. if your car isn't the size of a honda civic or smaller, you *don't* have a compact car. if you realize this and your just an a@#hole who thinks the word *compact* doesn't apply to you, i hope someone key's your car. 11:07 am

neale pointed to this salon article on dope wars. and now i'm thoroughly addicted. sigh. like i didn't have a thousand other ways to waste my time. 07:31 pm

salon runs an article on jwz's fight for extended club hours. via john. 06:34 pm

been in meetings all day. maybe more tomorrow. oh wait i've got meetings all day tomorrow. i hate meetings. can i just code, please, pretty please? 07:31 pm

i think i'd like to go to this conference. don't know if my company will pay for it tho. 07:18 pm

an interesting but very meandering article on internet time. 07:51 pm

just to bore you some more with my pacbell irritation. i replied to the auto-reply, which promised a real live email support agent. and got another auto-reply. this one just said we've got your message, don't call us, we'll call you. idiots. 07:42 pm

i finally got a reply to the nasty email i wrote pacbell this morning (the one that didn't bounce). they've implemented an auto-reply system which "automatically read and answered" my question. unfortunately, they gave me a completely irrelevant answer. "if the above response did not help you, please respond to this message using you e-mail program's Reply function". idiots. 07:23 pm

this is cool. weblog map of the universe. via metafilter. 07:16 pm

wow. i could play with this all day! 07:05 pm

ev teased us all with blogger features for expert users. but the ctrl+shift+enter thing doesn't work for me. i'm so disappointed. 06:59 pm

ever since i read the latest bloat, i've been trying not to be so much of a link slut, and to stop linking to ev, which is really hard to do since he's become "a diarrhea weblog", to quote meg. but, i can't do it and it's stupid to try to force myself not to. anyway, all of that was just intro to linking to pb who, not only pointed out that sxsw is the first big weblog event, but also suggested weblog summit 2001. i'm particularly interested in the panel on weblog addiction anonymous. 06:57 pm

dvorak rips apart microsoft for saying that people should "Avoid promiscuous Web browsing.". 06:18 pm

cool. my email is already getting forwarded. which means my email problems are solved. whether i'll ever get my backlog of mail from pacbell is still unknown. 05:29 pm

ah. my pop account finally got activated. if you want me to definitely get your email, send it to brigitte@eatonweb.com. the forwarding from my old address should kick in sometime tomorrow, so then i never have to deal with pacbell's mail server again 03:25 pm

oh, one more thing. the nasty email i sent to pacbell just got returned. user unknown. yet support@pacbell.net is plastered all over their site as their contact email. i should just go home, go back to bed, and pretend today never happened. sigh. 12:53 pm

mini-rant: today just all around sucks. my sister woke me up this morning to bitch about my lazy, lying housekeeper, who i now want to fire. but, none of the maids in the yellow pages answered the phone. i got stuck behind drivers going 65 in the fast lane, and obsessed about it all the way to work. i got to look at the new clip2 site and see the hundreds of little ways they destroyed stuff i'd spent the last six months getting right. i discover, from an email that just arrived but is 5 days old, that my resume has been harvested by *another* unscrupulous posting site. and to top it all off, pacbell's f*@king email servers are still going down sporadically. so i have no idea how much mail i've missed, or when i can access the mail that's coming in. oh and i typed this out once already and when i went to post it, blogger was down and lost the whole entry. arggghhh! ok, i feel better now. 12:46 pm

another bastard resume scraper: GeoWeb Interactive somehow harvested my resume. i'm thinking someone should sue these guys for harvesting copyrighted material. 12:00 pm

i ran across katie because derek linked to her rant about not being one of the cool kids on the web, but now all hate it. deja vue. anyway, i really like her writing. 08:07 pm

ah. found the article. it was a ny times article titled increasing the privacy of email. they were talking about hushmail who were quoted as saying

"We don't even know the pass phrase. If someone forgets their pass phrase, we can't help them," Gilliam said. Likewise, he said, "if we get a subpoena like we did today for e-mail records, we have to give the courts an encrypted message. There's nothing we can do about it."

i read an article last week about a company that encrypted all it's data in their database, so that when they were subpoeanaed the court couldn't read the encrypted data. but now i can't remember where i saw it. anyone? 07:01 pm

Yahoo! Real Estate is allowing people to bid on bay area homes through an auction. here's the cnet story. 06:36 pm

ugh. i just got out of another long marketing meeting. exhausting, design by commitee type meeting, where nothing got decided other than to have another meeting. upon leaving, i was handed this article. it made me laugh and at the same time cry, because the weasels are already coming. they weren't here two weeks ago, but they're here now. god, i need to start my own company. 06:27 pm

well, ev has redesigned *again*, so now i don't have to worry about stealing his color scheme for the project i'm working in. 10:02 pm

jason dug up this article on jim romenesko, the other weblogger getting paid to blog. 12:45 pm

i'm now sufficiently pissed off at pacbell to drop them as an isp. a week of email problems is irritating as all hell, and they're still happening. but, it seems like no santa cruz isp wants to take my money. they all expect me to call or show up in person. the one that did have an online form turned out to be an "inquiry" form, not a sign up form. sigh. 11:53 am

ah, the torture. lane has put up a teaser: "we're going to change the way you use the web. yeah, yeah. we know. a lot of people tell you this. but we really mean it. really!" with email notification. so now we can just sit back and await that email, all the time wondering what exciting thing they're doing, completely jealous that they've come up with the elusive "idea" and are thriving at it. me? jealous? hell yeah! 11:59 pm

another weblogger gets paid to blog. 11:35 pm

i finished the stormwatcher last night. it wasn't as good as the other graham joyce book i read (dark sister). it was a little too disjointed for my taste. 05:00 pm

i just added about 60 blogs to the portal. it's the first time in months that i've actually gone out looking for blogs, and i know i've barely scratched the surface. i also added language as a sorting option. and since i'm only doing updates once a week now, new blogs will hang around until the next update. 04:48 pm

well, i guess if i can't have diablo 2, i'll have to play god with The Sims. via ghost in the machine. 01:22 pm

i've been having problems receiving email all week. i didn't realize how bad it was until this morning when i got an email from 1/31/00. so if you sent me an email and i haven't replied, i'm probably not ignoring you. and you may want to send it again. 11:38 am

with the amount of money i've spent at amazon over the last year, you'd have thought i'd get a nice thank-you mug. but, no, everybody else has one tho. 03:26 pm

carlos, and some of the other spanish speaking bloggers, is looking for others (readers & writers) out there. i can't help, but maybe you can? 02:16 pm

awaited with bated breath, neale's countdown to pod (piss off day) has arrived. weblog junior high is hilarious, but i find it really scary that i'm listed alongside cam and peter as big wo/man on campus. and if you're not satisfied with neale's choices, you can even suggest new categories, or weblogs that are appropriate for a category. i think his 15 days of weblog fame have been extended! 02:03 pm

i finished emerald house rising by peg kerr wednesday night. it was almost as good as the wild swans. an extremely enjoyable read which kept surprising me with different plot twists. 12:39 pm

cool, if a 25 megaton nuclear bomb hit san jose, my home would be well into the 1psi range, which means i'd live. unless of course, i was at work. oh, but the fallout would definitely be lethal. i wish we'd had this back in the eighties, then we could have seen for ourselves how completely we'd be anihilated. via metafilter. 12:21 pm

more proof that weblogs have stories before the rest of the media. salon talks about epidemic.com which i linked to monday. 11:40 am

Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter. 11:25 am

this security hole is huge, but i wish they hadn't decided to call it css (cross-site scripting), it's going to cause no end of confusion with cascading style sheets. luckily, there's an easy fix. if you convert your < > to & lt; & gt; then the script won't execute. 11:22 am

i am now completely obsessed with the fact that drivers don't know the difference between the fast lane and the slow lane. yesterday, i saw a winnebago in the second from right lane. i have never seen a winnebago go fast enough to move out of the slow lane. today i was behind a bus in the fast lane, a bus if it's lucky can go 50mph, what possessed him to get in the fast lane? it's horrible, i'm being tormented by this. do people feel like the traffic law about slower traffic yielding/keeping right doesn't apply to them? 11:19 am

ah, the pleasures of personality tests, i feel compelled to link to them. this one tells you what tree you are. i'm an ash tree which means i'm "uncommonly attractive, vivacious, impulsive, demanding, does not care for criticism, ambitious, intelligent, talented, likes to play with fate, can be egotistic, very reliable and trustworthy, faithful and prudent lover, sometimes brains rule over the heart, but takes partnership very seriously." wow. amazing! all these tests are so accurate. via ev. 04:21 pm

i've fixed the mac ie scrolling problem! apparently, there's a bug in ie, where if you wrap a div inside a table, it won't give a scroll bar. remove the table and it will happily scroll. 01:46 pm

i forgot to mention, with the paypal thing, you get $10 just for signing up. and if you refer others, you get even more money. 12:27 pm

i've never seen paypal before, but the concept is amazing. imagine borrowing $5 for lunch, and instead of remembering that you owe your co-worker money, you beam it to them with your palm. pay by credit card even when people don't accept them. very cool. 06:22 pm

i also want an aibo, but i really don't want to spend $2500 on it. do you think if i talk about it enough sony will send me a free sample? 12:59 pm

i think i want one of these. although i'm guessing that microphone is in danger of being snapped off. 12:58 pm

amazon has redesigned their front door. it's horrible. they've taken an interface that people have been using for years and moved everything around. stupid and annoying and if they carry it throughout the site, enough to make me switch to barnes and noble. cnet has a story on it. 12:23 pm

the crow's nest restaurant in santa cruz has a tuesday night local lobster night. $12.95. yummy lobster. 07:03 pm

the new slow lane rant that meg pointed to is horribly accurate. except on 17, since there are only 2 lanes, all these people get in the fast lane. which is why i end up stuck behind two cars going 65mph side-by-side with no way to pass. 06:57 pm

i don't understand this. if you're gonna do a useless splash page, the least you could do is make it interesting with flash or something. 06:45 pm

2 studies show that "hostile individuals risk their health by having a cynical and cranky attitude". not only that, they go on to state that these people have "an exaggerated amount of body fat in the abdominal area". what timing, i was just looking for another excuse. 04:22 pm

and another, the nori nasal passage cleaner from lindsay. 03:26 pm

today is just the day for these kind of things. from cam we have the stadium pal male urine bag and bubblewrap clothing. 03:06 pm

finally, an urban legend email with a sense of humor! 02:49 pm

lane has started a startup journal so that he can tell us what he's doing to make millions without telling us *what* will make him millions. ben and bryan are also keeping track. 02:03 pm

this is just gross. but gross in a "i have to share" way. kissable toes. 01:34 pm

Race for the Rain Forest lets you click once a day to save the rain forest. on top of that, if you sign up, you can refer friends. if your friends sign up, and their friends sign up and their friends sign up, you can track how much of a difference you're making. 11:39 am

last night i read girl, interrupted by susanna kaysen. it was not as good as i expected and barely brushed the surface of what life was like inside a mental institution. there was one aspect which made it a worthwhile read though. her descriptions of what was wrong with her, what she was thinking and struggling with. scarily i could relate to many of them, which makes me wonder how many of us are really "sane". 10:45 am